[1] Absurdity

On a bookstore’s flashy electronic display, names of people born this day, and falling in the following categories: industrialists, sitcom actors, movie stars, pop queens, and fashion models. If you could notice who were not covered – writers, poets, philosophers - those animate ghosts of bookstores –you perhaps have seen the absurdity, moving like a blood clot, to the heart of United States of America

[2] Random lines, understood and not understood, from here and there

Peregrina paloma imaginara Que enardeces los ultimos amores Alma de lut, de musica y de flores Peregrina paloma imaginara – Ricardo Jaimes Freire, a Bolivian poet

Bad is Bach! – Slogan on a t-shirt

Glittergates of elfinbone – James Joyce

[3] Approximately two visual thoughts

An fundamental visual pattern – echoing Borges’s twelve patterns of metaphor in poetry – is the gesture of a woman’s hand playing with her hair, perhaps placing it behind her ear, perhaps letting it fall across her face. Even though he has seen this before, he always experiences a sharp aesthetic pleasure in observing this gesture.

An artist facing a blank sheet of paper with paints and brushes perhaps finds it a little easier to capture a face, with all it planes, angles and curves, that someone facing the same sheet with words.

On seeing a woman’s red hanging earrings, I also see my sister’s first set of earrings, also red and hanging, after her ears were punched some twenty years ago.

[1] The Riddle of Poetry

· Poetry, and even books of poetry, is something beyond aesthetic theories

· Whenever I have dipped into books of aesthetics, I have had an uncomfortable feeling that I was reading the works of astronomers who never looked at the stars.

· … books are only occasions for poetry.

· A poem is a book is dead until someone reads it.

· Art happens only when we read a poem

· I must confess that I think a book is not really an immortal object to be picked up and duly worshipped, but rather an occasion for beauty.

· So we needn’t really worry about the fate of ‘classics’?

· Greek: oinopa pontos. English: wine-dark sea.

· Sometimes beauty is also created by how language and the reader simply shift in and with time.

· And at the end of it, poetry is impossible to define in language.

[2] Metaphor

· Every word is a dead metaphor.

· That sentence is a metaphor in itself, and is true in an etymological sense.

· Twelve or so ‘stock patterns’ of metaphors can be identified at work in various poems.

· Chesterton: A monster made of thousand eyes? Night sky

· Stevenson: a mere animal, the color of flowers? A woman

· The effectiveness of Chuan Tzu’s beautiful poem of metaphor – a man dreaming he was a butterfly etc – hinges on the use of butterfly. It would have not been as beautiful if he had used, say a tiger, a whale or a typewriter instead.

· The beauty of Frost’s repetition of the line ‘and miles to go before I sleep’, lies in its allusive use of metaphor. Miles = life. Sleep = death.

· Some metaphors, like the Anglo Saxon kenning – sea = whale road – cannot be traced back to one of the stock patterns of metaphor.

to be completed later

This was a fascinating document of the wave of change that swept the world, and more particularly America at the end of World War II catapulting it to become a super power (and now the only) at the end of 20th century. In it were captured the genesis of some of the changes we now live with, and perhaps suffer from. And here is a short, and imperfect, chronicle from my memory.

Invention of the mall: The first mall opened in this decade in Indiana and went on to become one of the conspicuous symbols of America – in the early trip made by my mother to 1990’s L.A during in my childhood, one of the experiences she was impressed by and had to report back to us, were the gigantic pleasure/gratification complexes she had encountered over here. In the medieval ages visitors were perhaps taken to visit the Gothic cathedrals. In this age malls serve the same social and religious function.

Simultaneous death of public transit and vital teeming downtowns, and the onward march of suburbs and interstates: It was fascinating to note that smooth highways were being minted almost concurrently as trolley and tram tracks were being torn up in cities across the country, a precursor to how people live and work in most American cities now.

Cold War: The beginning of polarization of the world into opposing camps – the capitalist and the communist, and the war between them leading to development of hydrogen bombs, guided missiles and other, to use the present day terminology, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Thus we opened the Pandora’s Box. This war between political ideologies has now been replaced with a war between ‘religious’ and ‘loosely religious’ ideologies – War On, a noun called, ‘Terror’/ ‘Jihad’. Possible positive side effects: space exploration, development of medical technology (organ transplant technology etc). Possible positive side effects of the current war: better understanding of the world, acceptance of other religious verities?

Mass manufacturing: China and other ‘third’ world countries do this for us now more cheaply.

Civil Rights Movement: Are all races equal, under God? The question remains, as do slight traces of guilt, shame and denial of history in the American South.

Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt: A periodic display of xenophobia towards those who are not like ‘us’ or who believe in stuff ‘we’ think is dangerous for ‘our’ way of life. In the current age mirrored by the raise of confidantes of God into positions of power and their crusades against the ‘godless/heretics’ all over the world.

Birth of Rock & Roll, Beats, and TV studios: A break from older (trussed up, corseted?) social tradition – without creation of an alternative, and hopefully better, tradition. Fifty years later for many people in America, actors on the TV sitcom ‘Friends’, are the only true friends they have.

Rise of ‘post’, ‘pre’ and ‘ism’ in the artistic landscape: Dadaism, modernism, post-modernism, abstract expressionism etc. Lost and dazzled by this maze, we, the proletariat, don’t know what is art and what is shit anymore. Thus Disney Corp perhaps, is the latest avatar of Michelangelo? And why read books in a hypertext and always connected world? Question: If the typical cartoon representation of the Stone Age folk is a hirsute underdressed man/ underdressed woman walking around, swinging a stone club, what is the equivalent 21st century representation? A hirsute underdressed man/ underdressed woman walking around with a cell phone, a hand raised to one ear.

Invention of the Pill: When one is freed from the consequence of one’s actions by popping a pill what happens? Sexual freedom has become meaningless, when it seems to be the greatest anxiety and neurosis, afflicting present-day America – on the Right, the Left and the Center.

Acceleration of the Age of Science: Are we any more ‘enlightened’ and happier than the ‘primitive’ man? Related question: What is the sound of one hand clapping?